A Small Club That Welcomes Millions

The Midtown jazz club will begin broadcasting live performances through a partnership with Livestream.com, the Manhattan-based platform and network that facilitates the web streaming of live events.

By

Pia Catton

July 11, 2011

If one listens to the cynics, jazz is as dead as off-track betting. But if, as they claim, the genre has stalled and there's been nothing new since the 1960s, why aren't club owners rolling over and playing dead?

Because both the talent and the audience still exist. But until recently, the industry standard for connecting them was a club with Lilliputian tables or a small record label printing a few hundred copies. Now, technology can beam the video of that show to listeners anywhere in the world. And the performances can be recorded for digital or CD albums.

ENLARGE

Iridium owner Ron Sturm beneath the venue's new camera, which broadcasts concerts live on the Internet.
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

For a case study, consider the Iridium, the Midtown jazz club known in large part for its longtime association with the late guitar pioneer
Les Paul.
This week, the Iridium will begin broadcasting three to four live performances a week through a partnership with Livestream.com, the Manhattan-based platform and network that facilitates the web streaming of live events—be it a jazz show, red-carpet arrivals or a space-shuttle launch.

Iridium owner
Ron Sturm
decided to tap into the Livestream network as a way to make sure that what happens at the Iridium doesn't stay in the Iridium. "We are trying to grow beyond our four walls," he said.

The partnership is part of Livestream's new effort to bring concerts from various genres onto the web. "We install production technology and a camera," said the company's co-founder and CEO, Max Haot. "It's a remote model, so we don't have to send a crew every day."

ENLARGE

The camera captures Chip Taylor and his band in rehearsal.
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

The arrangement gives venues like the Iridium, which seats about 200, the ability to attract digital audiences beyond its region and its fan base. Livestream's record for an audience, during the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, was 230,000 concurrent viewers (people watching at any given moment) and 4 million viewers during the course of that day.

Livestream also has a dedicated concert page that houses enough acts and venues to give it a festival feel: A viewer can hop among streaming or archived concerts from venues such as Birdland, Joe's Pub, SOB's and the Knitting Factory Brooklyn. "These venues are not Madison Square Garden—this is about finding a balance to help small venues with up-to-date technology, so it's not a crazy investment on either side," Mr. Haot said. "If we promote it and they promote it, we can increase the audience by 10 times."

Expanding the online audience can also help one of Mr. Sturm's other new projects: Earlier this year, he installed equipment that will allow the Iridium to record the audio of a performances and then sell resulting album directly to listeners. "The economics of it are advantageous now," he said. "The bar is set so low. If you're a venue, you don't have to sell thousands of units. You have to sell hundreds of units."

His goal is to produce about 12 albums a year, some of which will be compilations of performances at the club; six should be ready to go by January.

The Iridium's growth is consistent with the ways in which several of the city's venerated jazz clubs have established media partnerships to help distribute music. The Village Vanguard regularly streams shows on the website of WBGO, the all-jazz radio station and NPR affiliate based in Newark. Jazz at Lincoln Center and Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (which also records shows) beams live performances out on Sirius XM Satellite Radio.

For its part, the Iridium will bring to the digital marketplace an emphasis on the legacy of Les Paul, who pioneered his own tech revolution when he helped invent the electric guitar in the 1940s. He started playing every Monday at the club in 1996, back when the Iridium was located at the corner of 63rd Street and Broadway. After a lease dispute, the owners and the guitarist moved to the current location at Broadway and 51st in 2001.

With Mr. Paul onstage, Mondays—a night to stay in for most working folks—became an attraction. And despite the guitarist's death in 2009, it has continued thanks to the weekly appearance of the Les Paul Trio. "Monday became a Saturday night with Les Paul," Mr. Sturm recalled. "Our Monday nights are very good because we're on people's radar."

The Trio is regularly joined by special guests at its weekly engagements. "We play his songs and try to keep his genius going," said the group's guitarist, Lou Pallo, who played regularly with Mr. Paul.

Throughout the rest of the week, the programming varies, but it's often guitar-focused. "We are standing for jazz and guitar, but we'll mix it up," Mr. Sturm said. "Jazz is any instrument, guitar is any genre."

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